Amazon has signed an agreement with X-energy and American Electric Power (AEP) to fund the building of a new nuclear energy facility in Indiana. The proposed plant, which would replace the now defunct coal-fueled Breed Generating Station in Fairbanks, Sullivan County, aims to provide up to 960 megawatts of carbon-free energy for both the regional power grid and Amazon’s data centers.
No timeline for construction or operation has been announced for the facility, which Amazon says “could” create 1,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent roles. The facility in Indiana is targeting to build 12 Xe-100 SMR’s, an advanced (but unproven) reactor that’s still undergoing development and licensing. These reactors can be cooled using either air, water, or a hybrid solution of both, which Amazon says should allow them to be deployed in water-constrained regions without impacting water demand in local communities.
Indiana also happens to be home to a famously expensive and uncompleted energy project called the Marble Hill Nuclear Power Plant. It was abandoned half-finished in 1983 after $2.5 billion had already been sunk into it, and has been under continued demolition since 2008. Terms for Amazon’s agreement in Fairbanks haven’t been disclosed, so we can’t compare the cost between the facilities.
This marks the second nuclear energy project that Amazon and X-energy are collaborating on, with the collective goal of working with regional utilities to deploy more than 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity in the US by 2039. In October last year, Amazon shared an early preview of its first planned nuclear plant, the Cascade Advanced Energy Facility in Washington. That project is similarly set to build 12 advanced reactors and create local jobs, but construction isn’t expected to start until the end of this decade.
Amazon is one of several tech companies, including Meta, Microsoft, and Google, that are exploring their own nuclear energy projects to power AI data centers. Investing in energy grid infrastructure was also one of the commitments that Amazon outlined in a lengthy blog post earlier this month that aimed to sway some of the growing negativity around data center projects, though it’ll be many years before anyone — including Amazon — can reap the benefits of these new facilities.
